Blonde magnetism

March 14 2003

Blondes. The very word sets off reactions: identification, hostility, envy, attraction, even jokes. All are relatively harmless compared with the impact of blondes through the ages. In the West alone they have variously personified seduction, sanctity, innocence, immorality, intellectual simplicity and racial superiority.

What exactly is the strange power exercised by blondes?

Joanna Pitman, an English journalist, first asked herself the question 20 years ago when she was working in a remote part of Kenya, where the sun had bleached her hair colour, she recalled, the Africans attributed to her powers of healing. Then, during her stint as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo, provincial Japanese were no less fascinated by her hair, staring at it and even anting to touch it.

Years later, back in London, her hair again its natural light brown, the question stayed with her. When she found no satisfactory answer on the shelves of the London Library, she decided to write her own history of blondes, from Greek times through the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Victorian era and into the 20th Century. The book, titled On Blondes (Bloomsbury), proves that there is definitely more to blondes than meets the eye.

For Pitman, 39, a Cambridge University graduate who is the photography critic at The Times of London, much of the work involved research into art, religion and politics. But first, as if to test her premise, she bleached her hair blonde. Her surprised husband remarked that she looked like Andy Warhol, but, more significantly, when she stepped out in London, she felt different.
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"I got wolfish looks from men and complicit smiles from blonde women, who seemed to acknowledge my beaconlike hair as if I was now a member of an elite cllub," she writes, recalling that she was suddenly given preferential treatment at the market as well as at the London Library. Her new look also made her feel "younger and, strangely, more positive". And she muses: "After a while I wondered whether I could afford not ot be blonde."

She is harldy alone. Among white American and northern European women on in 20 blondes is naturally so. And they have role models aplenty.

Coinciding with the publication of On Blondes, two photography shows are featuring famous blondes of the 20th Century.

Blondes, at the Getty Images Gallery, identifies Jean Harlow as the first platinum-blonde goddess of the screen, and includes portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly and Brigitte Bardot. British Blondes, at the National Portrait Gallery, offers 20 British celebrities, among them the actresses Diana Dors and Julie Christie, as well as Margaret Thatcher and Diana, Princess of Wales.

Certainly, whether created by nature, artists or beauty parlours, blondes through the ages have rarely been ignored.

Pitman starts her story in 360 BC, when Praxiteles may have used his mistress, Phryne, as his model for a statue of a blonde Aphrodite, who came to represent all forms of love.

The statue was endlessly reproduced, inspiring prostitutes to find ways to lighten their hair. The poet Menander decreed that "no chaste woman ought to make her hair yellow," but Homer preferred to imagine Aphrodite emerging from the sea wearing nothing but her blonde tresses.

In Roman times, the role of Aphrodite was assumed by Venus, another erotic goddess portrayed with golden locks. Again, she inspired prostitutes to hit the peroxide bottle, but the look also caught on as naturally blonde Germans were taken to Rome as slaves by conquering armies.

By the third century A.D., Christian preachers had concluded that the blonde and naked Venus was evil, yet lightening the hair or wearing a blonde wig remained a popular way of standing out among the dark-haired Romans.

Pitman then jumps more than a millennium to the Middle Ages, when blondes, at least those with dyed hair or wigs, were still considered hussies. By then, she notes, Venus had transmogrified into Eve, duly portrayed as a beautiful - and blonde - temptress. "In her wake trailed Mary Magdalene, one of her most promiscuous descendants," Pitman writes, pointing to Masaccio's 1426 Crucifixion, which shows Mary Magdalene at the foot of the cross, her long, blonde hair tumbling over a vivid red cloak.

Simultaneously, however, a battle over the symbolism of blondeness was taking place in other parts of Europe where the Virgin Mary was being portrayed as a blonde. These images were inspired by St Bridget, a 14th-century Swedish holy woman and presumably a blonde herself. Soon blondeness was also representing purity. The 14th-century Wilton Diptych by an unknown artist shows a blonde Virgin holding a blonde child surrounded by 11 blonde female angels.

During the Renaissance, the Virgin continued to be portrayed as blonde by Raphael and others, but Venus also returned to fashion - again as a blonde. "Venus," by Botticelli's workshop, shows her naked, with only her long blonde hair providing some modesty. Of course, the very streets of Venice offered ample evidence of the power of blondes, not least Lucrezia di Borgia, whose "glowing hair" became the stuff of sonnets.

In 16th-century England, the russet-haired Queen Elizabeth chose blondeness as a symbol of her virginity, and while it is not known if she dyed her hair blonde, this was how she was often portrayed, not only by poets such as Spenser but also by painters. A coronation portrait painted around 1600, 42 years after she came to the throne, shows a young Elizabeth with long blonde hair. The implied association between the Virgin Queen and the Virgin Mary was not accidental.

The 20th century brought the emergence of the blonde as a symbol of racial superiority. Long before Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, anti-Semitism was accompanied by a new myth of Aryanism, encouraged by the new fad of eugenics. But Pitman also draws interesting parallels between the Nazis' adulation of blondeness, the Soviet Union's promotion of the dynamic blonde ideal and "the development of a radiantly sunlit blonde American ideal, the WASP American dream."

In Hollywood, she notes, movies starring blondes fed racial paranoia by playing up the perils of mixed-race sex. "But the film offering the most outrageously heavy-handed dose of racial paranoia was King Kong," she writes, adding that it became one of Hitler's favourite movies.

In the United States, though, by the 1940s the vampish images of the likes of Harlow and Mae West had been replaced by what Pitman calls "socially well-behaved blondes," such as the wartime pin-up Betty Grable. Yet within a decade, prudery had again been swept aside by Monroe. Soon there were "dumb blondes" such as Mansfield, regal blondes like Kelly and girl-next-door blondes such as Debbie Reynolds. All that's changed since the '60s is it has become simpler to become a blonde.

Why this continuing fixation with blondeness? Pitman has no single answer, but she suggests that, by choosing to become blonde, women may feel younger, whiter and sexier. And if this idea was long promoted by poets and painters, it is now constantly drummed into the public by television and magazine advertising.